Simon Phipps made a handy dandy OpenJDK governance Score Card. Taking the proposed OpenJDK Community Bylaws draft proposal, and measuring it against the Open-By-Rule Benchmark. So you can quickly see how the current draft is doing against the ten benchmark rules (“open”, “meritocratic”, “oligarchy”, “license”, “copyright aggregation”, “trademark”, “roadmap”, “co-developers”, “forking” and “transparency”). Scoring goes from -10 till 10…

Finally created a new GPG key using gnupg. The old one was a DSA/1024 bits one and 8 years old. The new one is a RSA/2048 bits one. I will use the new one in the future to sign any release tarballs I might create.

It currently is only signed by my old key (0x95ABF50C), so if you trusted that really was me, then you can be pretty sure the new one is also me. But it would be good to get some more people to confirm the transition. So if you happen to come to Fosdem next weekend and run into me, please exchange GPG key details to confirm each others identity. Full public key available from my homepage and on the various keyservers.

Obvious, with only hours till we run out of ipv4 addresses, I am a little late to the party, but it was ridiculously easy to get an IPv6 tunnel going so that I will be able to happily connect to all those new IPv6-only hosts in the future. It literally took just 5 minutes.

On Fedora make sure you also run the network scripts on startup (it seems to default to NetworkManager only these days): chkconfig networking on.

Apparently things are even easier with 6to4 if you have a direct IPv4 address, but the above works even behind a NAT. The above doesn’t use all the fancy IPv6 features yet like providing automatic configuration for all your devices in your network. Such a tunnel will automagically provide you with at least 2^64 IPv6 addresses, and most likely you get a whole IPv6 /48 network meaning you will be getting 2^16 * 2^64 addresses (yes, that is more addresses than there are currently IPv4 addresses in the world!). But it is a nice start to make sure the future transition will be smooth.

See also /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/ipv6-tunnel.howto and/or /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/ipv6-6to4.howto for more information, including setting up all the fancy routing stuff on your local network if you want.

We already have some awesome proposals… but we want MORE!
So we’re giving you a little more time to get those talk proposals in.

We have reserved some slots for quick lightning talks (5 min), these can be done spontaneously at the event, but please do let us know if you are attending and will likely want to do one, even if you are not 100% sure yet. That way we can better schedule the time slots.

If you don’t want to give a talk, but want to support speakers attending the Free Java devroom at FOSDEM 2011, please see our sponsoring campaign: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/14110

Mark Reinhold recently pointed out that he, Joe Darcy and Brian Goetz had submitted their OpenJDK work on features for JDK7 and JDK8 to the JCP for standardization. Normally I am somewhat sceptical about the JCP. I don’t believe the JCP fosters a truly open process and discourages Free Software implementations. But Mark, Joe and Brian seem to be proving me wrong. Of course that shouldn’t have surprised me, since they have shown themselves to do everything in the open and actively involve the community in all their OpenJDK work. All their work has been published under the GPL for everyone’s free use.

The JSRs mention that the code for the Reference Implementation will be developed within the OpenJDK Community. Mark has kept the JDK7 planning page and features page public and up to date. And all (prototype) code of the various proposed JSR components is already available under the GPL. And people who have been followed the various OpenJDK mailinglists know that they have also already announced that they will keep using the existing OpenJDK repositories for developing the Reference Implementation and they look forward to continued collaboration with the community through those same open public mailinglists.

So these might well be the most open, public and free java platform JSRs out there. Now the Free Software implementation defined through the community in OpenJDK with comes first, and then gets standardized through the JCP. That seems a very good thing.

There are however still some small issues that in my humble opinion make this standardization effort less effective than could be. That mainly comes from some of the legalese included in these JSR proposals. The legal language used seems to not have caught up with the new OpenJDK reality yet. This might lead to the schizophrenic situation that the community that helps and takes advantage of the fact that we now collaborate in the open might not actually be able to use the results of this standardization process to check their own implementations are according to the official specification because the current terms seem incompatible with the terms of the GNU General Public License used for OpenJDK, IcedTea and other community derivatives of the code that implements the reference implementation.

Firstly the proposed specification license is tightly coupled with (passing) the TCK (which has its own problems, see the last point below) and contains restrictions, specifically on sub and super setting, which are incompatible with the GPL. But since most of the specification, like those for the full class library are also published under the GPL (just do a yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-javadoc), such restrictions on the official final specification license are counter productive and conflict with the actual implementation license used for OpenJDK. Secondly the proposed reference implementation license is still proprietary. As I pointed out before, this prevents anybody comparing pure OpenJDK, IcedTea or other derived binaries with the “official” reference implementation binaries. This again is counter productive for the community that actually produces these binaries. Mark Reinhold used to publish binaries of the Jigsaw work in progress under free terms on dl.openjdk.java.net, which would be a much better fit. Finally the proposed TCK license contains (field of use) restrictions. These were unworkable for OpenJDK6 and so a special Community TCK License Agreement had to be created. It would be nice if such special case TCK license terms weren’t necessary and OpenJDK7 derivatives could have a TCK license without GPL-incompatible restrictions from the start.

If these legal nitpicks could be fixed, then these platform JSRs look pretty sweet. Without these legal terms fixed however we could end up with a somewhat schizophrenic split community. Where those who collaborate on the open, free, GPLed implementation that is being standardized aren’t actually allowed to use the finalized specification, reference implementation and compatibility testsuite to check their own work.